A newly revised Chinese dictionary was published on Sunday, reflecting large changes in the language over the past seven years.
Some new words frequently used online, such as geili (awesome), leiren (shocking), zhainan (indoorsy man) and zhainu (indoorsy woman), have been added to the sixth edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, the authoritative Chinese language dictionary and a reference work on modern standard Chinese.
The new edition contains about 69,000 entries, including characters, words and expressions, idiomatic phrases and idioms. More than 3,000 words and expressions are new entries.
"The new words we selected for the dictionary are those related to social phenomena in recent years. They are not just words, but cultural symbols, reflecting our changing society," Yu Dianli, manager of Commercial Press, the publisher of the dictionary, said on Sunday.
The new words were judged according to whether they have a recognized and unified pronunciation and spelling, a theoretical base from linguistics and stable circumstances for usage.
Many commonly used words such as shengnan or shengnu (a man or woman who is still single despite being over the age that society deems proper for getting married) didn't make it into the new dictionary.
"We abandoned these words because it's kind of rude to label this group (with such words)," Jiang Lansheng, an expert in linguistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was responsible for the revisions, was quoted by Chinese Central Television as saying on Sunday. "Besides, tongzhi, (which literally means) comrade in English, can be used to call gay people now. But we don't want to promote the use of such a word in official occasions, so we didn't add it to the new edition."
